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I'm Eric Ries, author of "The Lean Startup" and new book "Incorruptible" – AMA

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Re: I'm Eric Ries, author of "The Lean Startup" and new book "Incorruptible" – AMA

#561

Post by throwaway2037 »

utopiah wrote: post #527
mehulashah wrote: post #135

Eric - I've worked for NASA, ATT, IBM, HP, Amazon, and Google, not to mention a couple of startups that I started in between. None of them (except the startups, but they were brief) stayed true to their original mission. I haven't read your new book, but IMO, it's because the founders leave and the next leadership don't share the vision or values of the founders in the same way. After all, a company is a collaboratio…

For NASA I don't know but all others that are private companies the "mission" is never "the mission". The mission is "making more money" and everything else, including the change in culture, is the result of how single focused "good" (according to the market) companies are. I was pondering about a piece of wisdom people often say, roughly going like "Oh yes, invest in stocks, the market always goes up!" and even thou…

I don't know why this comment is downvoted. You raise some interesting points.

First, for-profit vs non-profit. This is a great point. I have only worked for huge for-profits orgs my whole career. On the other hand, my mother worked as a first grade teacher (teaching children to read) for 35 years. The difference in our view of the workplace is night and day: She views it as much more benevolent because other teachers are your peers and are genuinely friendly and helpful. My more grizzled view is like the jungles during Viet Nam War: Live to fight another day.

Second: Again, another good point. When most people say "the market", they usually mean one or two big indices, like Dow Jones Industrial Average, or NASDAQ 100, or S&P 500. You are right: As a result of their (mostly) rules based system to periodically re-balance the index, losers fall out and winners arrive.

Re: I'm Eric Ries, author of "The Lean Startup" and new book "Incorruptible" – AMA

#562

Post by eries »

evolve2k wrote: post #548

A core principal from Toyota Lean Production and Demings TQM, is that a critical way to increase quality is to address waste coming upstream, including the waste of fixing defects. The argument that “AI runs so quickly” reminds me of the American manufacturing technique of making a machine lunch out widgets whether they were needed or of not to maximise throughput. As any lean practitioner knows this leads to multipl…

Oh my God, we're seeing this kind of waste of overproduction everywhere with AI. In fact, I've noticed that even when I vibe code a product, I often wind up adding tons of additional features that I didn't plan to, simply because the AI makes it convenient to do so. I even feel the vision for the project starts to drift in line with what the AI wants rather than what I want.

Re: I'm Eric Ries, author of "The Lean Startup" and new book "Incorruptible" – AMA

#563

Post by eries »

eries wrote: post #562
evolve2k wrote: post #548

A core principal from Toyota Lean Production and Demings TQM, is that a critical way to increase quality is to address waste coming upstream, including the waste of fixing defects. The argument that “AI runs so quickly” reminds me of the American manufacturing technique of making a machine lunch out widgets whether they were needed or of not to maximise throughput. As any lean practitioner knows this leads to multipl…

Oh my God, we're seeing this kind of waste of overproduction everywhere with AI. In fact, I've noticed that even when I vibe code a product, I often wind up adding tons of additional features that I didn't plan to, simply because the AI makes it convenient to do so. I even feel the vision for the project starts to drift in line with what the AI wants rather than what I want.

I guess I should also say that the one tool that I've used that doesn't do this is the one made by my friends at Answer.ai called solveit. You can check it out here at solve.it.com

Re: I'm Eric Ries, author of "The Lean Startup" and new book "Incorruptible" – AMA

#564

Post by eries »

frankieg33 wrote: post #544

This is a fantastic topic to cover. I have been lately talking about Costco being one of the best companies today. They are not erroding trust and somehow resisting the ratchet of optimizing for the next quarter (I mean its culture and norms). That trust allows me to spend so much more on my trips than I would at any other store. I really look forward to reading this book.

That's it exactly. Trust is part of a virtuous performance cycle that causes them to both be more true to the mission and also to make more money and therefore be able to invest more in the mission, etc.

Re: I'm Eric Ries, author of "The Lean Startup" and new book "Incorruptible" – AMA

#565

Post by lebovic »

davedx wrote: post #525
lebovic wrote: post #168

I worked at Anthropic, and I wouldn't attribute much to the structure itself – so I'm wary of using it as a positive example here. I do attribute a lot to specific people. Concretely, to much of the intitial team, who they recruited on the research/infra side, and some very close personal relationships within research/infra. That dynamic, paired with their unwillingness to accede to something against their values, is…

The policy decision to silently nerf AI/ML code produced by Fable surely wasn't just something "accidentally imported via a bad hire"? It seems to me like Anthropic wants to control who can develop frontier AI models. Maybe from inside Anthropic that seems like a noble mission, but from the outside it seems like downright shady anti-competitive behavior. I saw in latest news the decision has been partially reversed -…

My point was that Anthropic has tended to make atypical decisions vs. its peers, not that they're always the right decisions. The direction of those decisions has tended towards assuming exponential growth of AI will continue and a certain flavor of AI safety.

This decision does seem in line with what I would expect from Anthropic, so I don't see it as a sign of changing values – even if I personally disagree.

Re: I'm Eric Ries, author of "The Lean Startup" and new book "Incorruptible" – AMA

#566

Post by eries »

nicksbg wrote: post #510

I think that for example Zuckerberg has built a structure where he is basically irreplaceable. It had to do with A/B shares where, while having a lot less shares, he made sure to have the controlling ones. While this is good while the founder is alive, it sort of begs the question how long will the company that has structure like that run after the founder is gone. I believe it could go to some family foundation that…

I cover this topic extensively in the book. I think the fact that founders are increasingly turning to the political solution of "despotic emperor for life" tells you more about how bad standard governance is than anything else. I think vesting this power in a singular person or small group of people has all the downsides you'd expect from studying history. In the psychology literature, they literally have a name for "hubris syndrome." That is a mental illness that sets in when people have too much power.

In the book, I make the case for what I call constitutional governance, which I see as a third way in between standard governance and founder-controlled governance. I think it is both more effective and more long-term. After all, a company that is tied to the human lifespan has a built-in expiration date.

Re: I'm Eric Ries, author of "The Lean Startup" and new book "Incorruptible" – AMA

#567

Post by eries »

kshahkshah wrote: post #543
systems wrote: post #541

its 43 CAD at amazon so no a book like this should be 20-25 CAD max specially since its clearly a pop corn read .. "I won't pretend I have this all figured out" .. I don't think anyone should pay 43 CAD to read you thinking out loud (the lean startup is 25 CAD by the way, with a 10% discount) if ever it goes on discount on amazon, maybe

You can always use the library

Strongly endorse this way of thinking. If your local library doesn't have enough copies, I'd be glad to donate one.

Re: I'm Eric Ries, author of "The Lean Startup" and new book "Incorruptible" – AMA

#568

Post by eries »

ianberdin wrote: post #508

«Please shut up and take my money». Jokes aside - can’t wait. Your book The Lean Startup helped me so much. I read it tens of times. It’s one of the reason I got great traction with mine startup https://playcode.io - AI App Builder on our custom cloud. Thank you Eric.

Thank you. That's very nice of you to say.

Re: I'm Eric Ries, author of "The Lean Startup" and new book "Incorruptible" – AMA

#569

Post by eries »

hopefulobject wrote: post #506

Is the most important decision to avoid corruption choosing a good business to go into in the first place? Because I feel like some businesses, like free social media which make their money off of ads, are more corruptible than others.

Of course that's true, but then don't forget that business model is a choice.
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